I brushed out the next section. Chopped another ten inches.
A growing bravado from Muslim extremists had intensified the wars with…well, anyone who wasn’t Muslim. The U.S. spent years attacking the source. But when the war arrived on U.S. soil on April first, everything changed. I tried to put up a wall around my remembrance of the day the virus hit. An ugly ball of grief swelled in my throat and my memories pierced through.
I sat in the boardroom at work. Grain Valley Elementary flashed on my cell phone. The school’s nurse. Annie and Aaron had high fevers. I called Joel and left to pick up the kids.
Annie and Aaron died ten hours later.
I yanked the comb through a tangled knot. Gave up. Cut an angle to frame my face. The next section dropped in my eyes.
Those final ten hours replayed in my head every day since. Tucked together in Annie’s bed, my A’s held on to each other through bouts of fevers and chills. Joel and I held on to them. We sang their favorite songs with them. When their voices ebbed, we read to them. They dozed in and out of consciousness and I told them, “When you feel better, we’ll go to the park. We’ll slide down that big slide you love.”
Two little heads bobbed in agreement.
“We’ll go to the zoo. You know we just got a new polar bear? We’ll go visit him.”
That earned me pallid smiles. I kissed them all over their tiny faces and hands. “Mommy loves you so much.”
When Aaron exhaled his final breath, Annie touched his cheek. “Mama? Where did my brother go?”
I shook my head. The weight of the house pressed down the ceiling and crushed my chest. The walls closed in. Squeezed my shoulders. Cut my breaths.
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll find him.” The curve of Annie’s mouth slacked. The rise and fall of her torso slowed. Stopped.
I extended the scissors open. The sharp end sliced my wrist. Blood dripped down my arm and pooled in the bend at my elbow. I hadn’t shed a single tear in my grief. Joel always teased that I was born without tear ducts. Even through my children’s deaths, even while in the deep well of despair I’d receded into, my eyes remained dry.
We never impressed a religious opinion on our A’s. They asked numerous questions about creation and death, to which we would shrug our shoulders and ask them what they thought. In our worst nightmare, we weren’t prepared for our dying daughter’s inquiry.
Where did my brother go?
I stabbed the scissors’ edge deeper into my wrist. Would bleeding be a proxy to crying? The tip felt cold and unforgiving against my skin. I pressed harder. Crimson welled. I waited to bleed out, to feel peace as my life soaked into the carpet.
“It’s shorter than mine now.”
I jumped. Joel leaned around the door frame. I followed his gaze to my wrist. The scissors hovered over the unblemished skin. I blinked, shook off the fantasy and set the scissors down.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “I attempted the shag style teen boys were wearing. Think I can pass as one?”
He stared at my chest. A smirk plastered his face.
I flattened my palms on my breasts. “I can make these less noticeable. Otherwise, what do you think?”
He kissed me. “I think your body armor and weapons will help.”
I returned the kiss with a love that matched my hate for the world.
“Come on.” He led me to the den.
I nestled into one end of the couch. The room touted two stories of floor to ceiling windows and opened to the deck and sun room. The reflection from the pool water rippled along the khaki walls. Behind us, a staircase led to the open balcony of the top floor. The floor once occupied by a seven-year-old girl adept at painting flowers and a six-year-old boy who proudly conquered Lego Star Wars on the Xbox. Having our bedroom on the main level made it a little easier to ignore the rooms upstairs.
He knelt over me, took my mouth with his and rescued my thoughts. I reveled in the feel of his weight on me.
We came up for air. Good to know I could still throb from only a kiss.
His voice was husky. “What were you obsessing about in the bathroom?”
He knew too well how my anxiety funneled south, bottlenecking between my legs.
I locked my thighs around his hips. “The virus.”
His eyes darted to the top of the stairs. He tensed, seemed to be engaged in some kind of internal war. His jaw clenched, relaxed, then he looked at me, heavy-lidded, resolve in place. “The virus you survived.” His lips moved down my neck.
The virus that was created by a Muslim insurgency and released in Denver International. The virus that killed or mutated victims within a few hours of exposure.